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much joy: for with half your years, and not half your experience, in
business I have met with many such: indeed, to speak the truth, I
doubt it is the case more or less with all of us.
But if, without troubling yourself about general theories
of human nature, you have a mind for a more palpable test of the
propriety of this reasoning, you may cut the matter short enough,
by making an experiment upon a Contractor, and trying try whether he
will give you as good terms, with these doggs about him, as he would
without them. Sure I am, that were I in his place, I should require no
small abatement to be made me, if instead of choosing the employments
for my own men, I was liable, at every turn, to have them
taken out of my own hands, and put tp different employments, by A,
B, and C today, and by X, Y and Z tomorrow.
I say taken out of their hands for besides vesting the
choice of the trades in committees of Justices in the first instance, the
same Magistrates are called upon to exercise their judgment and
ingenuity into classes in such manner that the longer a man had
staid his labour was to be less and less severe, exception
made for delinquency, in which case a man might at any time be
turned down from an upper class to a lower. Another reason this for
suspecting that no great dependance had been placed on the interest
that was to be given him in the produce of his labour. For if that
interest had had the same operation in these hands as it has out of them
the labour instead of being less and less severe the longer a man
had staid there would have been more so: more productive at least
which is the only measure that in one and the same trade can will
be taken of its severity. for the harder or if you please the more severely
a man works the more if he is paid accordingly he will get. In a view
to profit, and especially to say profit that might be made by a
continuance of the same business after discharge this provision must
appear somewhat singular: for they were to do less and less work, you
see in proportion, as by practice it would have naturally come to sit
still easier on them, and in proportion is they had approached
nearer to the period. I mean that of their discharge, when it would be
most wanted and most use. As to reformation even in Penitentiary
houses much more in an establishment where innocence would be so
effectually secured by impotence as it would under the inspection
principle. I know of no better test or measure of such a result than the
improved productiveness of a man's work, a quantity which if left to
itself would go on increasing rather then diminishing but which these
regulating powers as far as they were exercised would tend rather to diminish than increase.
Upon the whole, you will not wonder, that I should have
my doubts at present, whether the plan was rendered much the better
for their ingenious but complicated refinements. They seemed
might fine to me at the time: for, when I saw consideration forecast and contrivance, I expected success proportionable. But since I wrote that little hasty
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